Building a community for your employee ambassadors is what Ambassify is genuinely about. This article will dive deeper into what we mean by community.

Thanks to your brand ambassadors — aka your employees — traditional advertising no longer needs to be your primary driver for sales. Recommendations and endorsements from advocates have a higher impact on the perception of your brand and company than ads, banners, and other traditional marketing methods.

Have you identified those employees who have proven to be the most loyal advocates of your brand? You can invite them into a private online community to communicate with them and create content for them to engage with each other and with you. Here you can also ask them to like, share, and interact with your content on social media or ask them for input and feedback on important topics.

Building a community of employees will be an added value for your brand, but don’t forget to consider the value for them, your employees. Keeping them engaged in a community can be challenging, but there are several ways to still do so and to stimulate motivation inside the community. The primary goal of the community is to create two-way communication between your brand and advocates. As a brand, you provide your employees with unique insights into the inner workings of your company; in return, they will give you their opinion on all sorts of issues. Once you launch your community and achieve a feeling of trust, the community can be used for many more things. We provide you with the tools to ask for referrals, share on social networks or even chime in on discussions on the internet.

Good employees add value to a brand. Great employees are part of your brand, advocate for it, and recommend your brand to their friends and family without hesitation. If you invite these employees into your private community, you should consider them part of your brand’s family. Therefore, it’s essential to think about who you want to invite to your community and ask yourself if they will be responsive enough to react to the content you publish.

Have you already identified your greatest brand advocates and are eager to get started? Invite them into your community using the community invite message preset in the messages module.

By now, you might be wondering what a community looks like. The primary elements are the campaigns (1) you create to ask your advocates to interact with, (2) the points they collect if they do, and (3) the leaderboard, where they can find how many points they have earned so far and the ranking with the other employees. Below you will find an example of what a great community could look like:

In a community, you can ask your employees to answer different questions and complete different actions via what we call ‘campaigns.’ Depending on what you’d like them to do, you can choose a different type of campaign:

I've included more information on the campaigns you can create for your employees here.

The interactions of your advocates are of significant value to your brand and/or company. To create healthy and friendly competition, you can reward your advocates with points for them to collect after completing a campaign. These points allow them to climb the leaderboard and save up to claim a reward with them.

A leaderboard helps you keep your community members engaged; each action they perform will reward them with some points, allowing them to surpass others. For those leveraging Ambassify as an employee advocacy platform, this often plays out as a friendly contest among colleagues.

Another method of leveraging the leaderboard is through rewards. If you choose to enable rewards, your advocates can exchange points for rewards. These rewards are entirely up to you and can be configured at will. More information about rewards can be found here.

Once your advocates have access to the community, you must have the correct information since you want to tailor your content to their interests. Fortunately, you don’t have to do any of this manually. An Ambassify community helps you by occasionally asking employees for information missing from their profiles.

You don’t have to do anything for this to work; we only need to know what information you are interested in when setting up your Ambassify account. The community will then show your advocates a challenge we call the Connect challenge, allowing them to connect their social networks and thus complete their user profiles.

Keywords: community, getting started, ambassador DNA, leaderboard, start, campaign, points